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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28855632">pyre</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/athoughtfox/pseuds/athoughtfox'>athoughtfox</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Chronicles of Narnia (Movies), Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Vague Yearning, Wine, exploring Bacchus's appearance in the pc book</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 04:54:27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,084</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28855632</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/athoughtfox/pseuds/athoughtfox</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The sky is filling with roused stars, each point as glittering and silver as a pin. On the grass, Caspian spies a sinewy trail of new ivy on the land that was empty only a glance past. He looks around wildly, seeing the ivy’s long fingers smooth across the earth, its flush grasp of the nearby trees. They are surrounded in silence.</p><p>“He is coming,” says a nearby naiad.</p><p>-</p><p>In which Caspian meets the Kings and Queens of Old under the auspices of the wine god.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Caspian &amp; Edmund Pevensie, Caspian &amp; Peter Pevensie, Caspian &amp; Susan Pevensie, Edmund Pevensie &amp; Lucy Pevensie &amp; Peter Pevensie &amp; Susan Pevensie</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>139</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>pyre</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>Bacchus is the god of many things.</em>
</p><p>Lucy is singing, long and trilling and wordless to Caspian’s ears. Her high voice splits the air with painful sweetness and the early stars blink suddenly awake, each piercing the lilac mist like an arrow. Dusk is falling heavily, its long exhale filling the sky with clouds of lazy violet and bright, swimming orange.</p><p>Caspian walks the clearing, feeling every beat of his own heart. His blood has hardly settled since the end of the battle, hours ago now. The Dwarves had brusquely reclaimed his armour and the Dryads, laughing, stolen his boots, so he wanders barefoot on the cool lush stroke of the green grasses, the occasional queasy crunch of the russet patches, left over from the very fringes of the battle which had reached as far back as this clearing.   </p><p>The dark thickens, Lucy’s call carving through it like the tender edge of a knife. The sky is filling with roused stars, each point as glittering and silver as a pin. On the grass he has just walked, Caspian spies a sinewy trail of new ivy on the land that was empty only a glance past. He looks around wildly, seeing the ivy’s long fingers smooth across the earth, its flush grasp of the nearby trees. They are surrounded in silence.</p><p>“He is coming,” says a nearby naiad, their hair dripping and bluish skin with an amphibian glisten, though there are no streams nearby.</p><p>“Who?” asks Caspian, breathless.</p><p>“Eleutherios, the Roarer, the God That Comes,” the naiad smiles, eyes giving their languid double blink, “who has already run through the towns and cracked their stones. Their fountains flow in wine; my water is wine also. He came with the Queens who called on us. He has not set foot in this world for many years, but now the chains are broken, the bridge is broken, and he comes.”</p><p>With a shiver, Caspian realises that Lucy has fallen silent and the warm moon is standing over them, yellow as wheat, far larger than the moon he remembers from his astronomy lessons, far larger than the moon he remembers from last night. Into this twilight comes the shrill, seizing cry, <em>euan-oi-oi-oi</em>, distant and wild and thrilling as the howl of a wolf.</p><p>At the centre of the clearing, the growing bonfire leaps, sparks tossing up against the dark sky like mock stars. <em>Euan-oi-oi-oi</em>, the shrieking call to revelry sounds again. This time with a grin Lucy stands from her place at Aslan’s golden flank, cups her small hands at her mouth, and gives her own whoop in reply, a sudden rip in the stillness of the clearing. Her voice is vast for such a small thing; it bursts from her like the song of a dozen birds, ringing, echoing, capering over the treetops long after it should have fallen silent. The night shivers.</p><p>She is answered by dusty drums and hoarse pipes, the Narnian wood-music so long silent. It wavers uncertainly, but in the space of a few breaths resolves into a rhythm that Caspian can feel in the dark earth beneath his feet. The throaty harmonies of the pipes unfold over one another and he already begins to feel drunk, their headiness carrying him with the force of a river.   </p><p>Into this leap the wild women from the shadows of the trees, swift and mad-eyed as hares. Among them walks the young god, wading through the twilight, sprinkling wine on the battlefield as he goes. Caspian’s air goes thin at the nectar of that face, only seen before now in the pages of the books he had stolen from Cornelius’s locked chest. His lips and cheeks have the ruinous luxury of crushed flowers; his eyes, dark and soft-sharp as berries, drift over Caspian uncaught. </p><p>Around the fire there is dancing, a great dizzying swing in which no dancer ever seems to put a foot wrong. At its centre, Susan dances alone, spinning like an autumn wind. The air, the music, the dancers; all turn on her lead, following the direction of her tread. Under her bare feet embers smoulder, glowing warmly into life wherever she stands, smeared up to her ankles in mud and ash. As she whirls, the blaze catches in the pale mirror of her eyes and is reflected there, burning. Her long dark hair is gilded at the edges by the touch of the fire; the light noses at her uncovered shoulder, smooth as milk. She shimmers among the flames like a dream.</p><p>Caspian does not know how long he watches her, but suddenly his skin draws tight and with a start he realises that he is himself watched. When he turns, Edmund is standing behind him with his knowing, wine-darkened smile. In the writhing firelight, his eyes are black. A silence thick as smoke hangs between them and when Caspian speaks, his voice chokes.</p><p>“Susan said that she did not know Bacchus. I had thought he did not come to Narnia, in your time.”</p><p>Edmund’s grin opens, gleaming. There is soil clinging between his teeth. It was said his mouth was ever cold and sweet, after he had eaten magic.</p><p>“We’d forgotten.”</p><p>-</p><p>Stumbling and heavy with wine, he happens upon Peter later, away in the dim and quiet of the smaller clearing where the battle’s leftovers are gathered to be burnt at dawn. He is standing tall and untouchable as a ghost, above the long dark lick of his shadow in the grass.</p><p>Earlier, under the noon sky of raw and gasping blue, Peter had knighted him with the blood-warmed flat of Rhindon. He in turn had sworn to serve under the High King, on his knees in the cold mud, and when Peter had sighed a ready breeze had risen to lift Narnia’s banners over the field of victory.    </p><p>Now, at Caspian’s intrusion, the High King smiles his absent, cool-eyed smile, and bends to bless another of the Narnian dead.</p><p>“Did they ever build you a tomb?”</p><p>When Peter looks at him, ice-bright, he feels it down to his marrow. At the duel, he’d watched as the eager soil had soaked up the High King’s blood, thirsting after so many years. And now the moonlight, touching his face with hungry reverence. And Caspian finds that he is the High King’s as helplessly as are the moonbeams, the whispering winds, the dry-lipped earth.</p><p>-</p><p>Back in the clearing, Bacchus comes to him with a bowl of wine. His smile is ancient, delicious, cruel.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This originally appeared in a shorter form on my Narnia tumblr of the same username, and has since expanded a bit. For anyone who hasn't read the Prince Caspian book: at the end Bacchus makes a rogue appearance and Ed eats some dirt. </p><p>Some notes on Bacchus I made while doing research for this, in case any folks are interested: the name Eleutherios is a historical epithet of Bacchus (or Dionysus, really, since it's Greek) and means 'Liberator', pointing to Bacchus as a god who frees from chains and restrictions; one of his applications was as a god who freed people from their own cares, but also from oppressive restraints imposed by others, which is probably part of why he turns up after Narnia has been liberated in PC. He shares this epithet with Eros, so take from that what you will. The Roarer is a slight deliberate mistranslation of 'Bromios', which means 'Roaring' and is a link to the wind, but also to certain animals. As well as being the god of wine and theatre, he was also a god of fertility, festivity, and madness (particularly of the religious and ecstatic kinds), among other things. Some scholars class him as a 'died and risen again' god, putting him in a theological category which does of course also include Jesus/Aslan as he appears in the Christian narrative and the Narnia books.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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